JUNE 14, 1999:
Gorf. QBert. Zaxxon. Kaboom. Yar'sRevenge. Hunt the Wumpus. Dig Dug. For anyone
who's ever played them, just hearing the titles of these vintage masterpieces can
trigger an overpowering flood of sense memories -- the look of the chunky two-dimensional
graphics, the hypnotic repetition of boinks and bleeps, the dull ache in your button
thumb --a remembrance of video games past.

For those who haven't played these classic games, it may seem ridiculous that
anyone was ever enthralled by them, and utterly appalling (or hilarious) that some
people are still slavishly devoted to them. But consider this: "'Tis a Gift
to Be Simple." That old Quaker hymn served as the theme music for Coleco's 1982
game Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle. The phrase also serves to encapsulate
the appeal of retrogames: simple design, simple packaging, and simple gameplay with
straightforward objectives. Curt Vendel of the Atari Historical Society says, "To
coin a phrase from Nolan Bushnell [the founder of Atari], 'Make the games easy to
learn and hard to master,' and that's what they did."

Not only were these retrogames just simpler to
understand, that simplicity made it easier for a players to lose themselves in the
onscreen figures. In her book Joystick Nation, J.C. Herz writes, "It
turns out that players actually identify more with the blocky, primitive, symbolic
characters than with these 3-D polygon action figures. ... Characters in Mortal
Kombat have fingers and stubble. You watch them. Pac-Man has one black dot for
an eye, and you become him."

You won't find many techno-Luddites willing to argue that classic games are better
than the latest ones. Modern games are kinetic and viscerally exciting. They offer
sleekly cinematic graphics, exquisite control, and the freedom to conjure up entire
worlds.

But the old games refuse to die.

Some arcades in town still hang onto tried-and-true standbys like Elevator
Action, Galaga, or Ms. Pac-Man, and often they're just as popular
as their newer neighbors. You can find classic games and game systems at flea markets,
thrift stores, and the City-Wide Garage Sale. In fact, it's still possible to order
replacement parts from Radio Shack, and you can still purchase used cartridges from
Gamefellas in Northcross, Lakeline, or Barton Creek Mall. And if anyone pulls one
of these babies out at a party, rest assured that it'll be the center of attention
all night.

However, the real action in the retrogamer community is happening online. Any
cursory Net search on classic games will turn up endless lists of newsgroups, fan
sites, swap lists, new versions of old games, and instructions on how to cheat at
them, impenetrable explications of archaic programming languages, and, of course,
lots of people trying to sell you stuff.

"Classic games have always been, and still are, a niche hobby, but one that's
definitely growing," explains Alexendar Bilstein, an Austinite who created the
Atari 2600 Nexus Web site. "Ebay, the Internet auction site, has given birth
to a large number of classic gamers over the last year -- people stumble across a
listing for an Atari 2600 that they haven't thought about in 15 years and get sucked
into the hobby."

The Atari 2600 was the titan of the home video
game industry from the late Seventies to the mid-Eighties, and it still reigns supreme
in the hearts of countless retrogamers. A recent Ebay search produced no less than
867 Atari 2600s available for bidding. "The 2600 is definitely the king,"
says Bilstein. "It's basically the original blueprint for video game consoles
that is still followed today."

Austinite Brad Fregger was director of training at Atari and a game producer at
Activision during the golden age of video games. "Many of us knew we were making
history," says Fregger. "Nobody has any idea what it was like at Atari
from 1979 to 1983. This was the wave of all waves, a ride beyond compare." A
wave so huge, its ripples are still being felt, especially in a town as nostalgic
and sentimental as Austin.

"In my opinion, there are certainly a large number of [classic games] collectors
in Austin," remarks Bilstein. But while the interest clearly exists, Bilstein
is still having difficulty creating a community. The classic games conventions he's
held for the past couple of years have been "pretty small and informal. They
were just held at a friend's place."

"I didn't even know they had classic gaming expos," says Fregger. "I
would attend one if it were here in Austin. It would be great to see and play some
of these old games again, especially Pitfall II on the Atari 800 [which Fregger
produced at Activision]."

So why this continuing interest in the old games? Is it just another symptom of
the Gen X fetish for all things Seventies? Well, a kid who was 10 when Atari hit
its peak in 1982 would be 27 now -- time to be a grown-up, get a real job, maybe even
(gulp) settle down. Maybe like all other retrotrends -- clothing, music, film -- the
rise in the interest of retrogames is just another example of the need for the familiar
comfort of childhood. Or maybe when you get down to it, the games were just better
then.

Curt Vendel, who maintains the Atari Historical Society's online Virtual Museum,
notes that, "People want to go back to a simpler time where you walk up, read
two lines of instructions, and knew the game. People want clean, simple challenges,
and are tired of the 45-move joystick/button combinations it takes to do a roundhouse
kick."

Modern games require diligence and commitment. In order to play the home game
G-Police, a player must watch a 45-minute film that explains the back story
of the game, then spend weeks learning how to maneuver the ship before ever actually
playing the game. Retrogames, on the other hand, offer the more direct hedonistic
pleasures of the era that spawned them. Treat a classic like Missile Command
to a few quarters' worth of introduction, and it'll rock with you all night.

Fregger, who helped create some of these classics,
says that the early programmers had no choice but to make games using their creativity.
"The big difference was that the early games had to depend on gameplay because
the graphics capability wasn't very good. Many modern games are either multimedia-intensive,
with weak gameplay, or boring copies of something that was extremely popular. ...
Many of the modern game designers have forgotten the essential characteristics of
a game that grabs you and doesn't let go."

Bilstein says that for many, the pursuit of retrogames means a lot more than just
rewinding back to their childhoods. "There's a more serious appreciation some
people have for the history, the innovation, and the amazing games that some programmers
were able to create with only 2K of memory."

Appreciation? Serious?! The words have the connotations of junior high music classes
-- not of something entertaining, but of something that's (shudder) good for you.
And while it's hard to find retrogamers who take themselves or their hobby too seriously,
you don't have to look very hard to see a strain of sober historicism mixed in with
the fun and games.

"It's archaeology, pure and simple," says James Hague, author of Halcyon
Days, a collection of interviews with classic game programmers. "In 1978,
there were only a handful of computer games. By 1984 we'd already churned through
a thousand or more games, including dozens of true landmarks: Star Raiders,
Eastern Front, Choplifter, Flight Simulator, M.U.L.E.
The history accumulated during those six years is very thick."

What makes this task of archeology difficult is the fact that the games' creators
often went completely uncredited for their work. Hague, who himself wrote the early
game Bonk ("You ran around in an open maze and were chased by critters
that bonked backward for a few seconds after they hit a wall"), also has a Web
site called the Giant List, which singles out all the forgotten makers of the golden
age games.

This lack of respect became a real problem in the industry. Fregger and many of
Atari's best programmers left the company over the issue of receiving proper credit.
"This was one of Atari's biggest mistakes. The funny thing was that they were
owned by Warners, who was supposed to know the value of star power. It just goes
to show you how stupid some senior executives can be."

Determined to learn from the mistakes of Atari, these breakaways formed their
own company. Fregger explains, "Activision gets the credit for bringing the
names of the first video game star programmers to the public, with David Crane [Freeway,
Pitfall, Decathalon] as the first star. The programmers were in charge.
They started the company and they decided what they would make." This primacy
of the programmer helped Activision to make many of the finest games of the decade.

Hague asserts that part of the enduring appeal of the early games is that they
were frequently made by these single individuals, "which makes them closer to
other traditional forms of artistic expression." Like the greatest film directors
of the cinema, they are auteurs, and with Hague's site, perhaps they will no longer
be forgotten.

"A significant number of people who worked on early games obviously followed
their own visions. Chris Crawford had a strong interest in linguistics, and his Gossip
was a game about interpersonal relationships. Jordan Mechner cast a martial arts
game [Karateka] as a drama, with camera cuts and a simple, advancing plot.
Bill Williams, the Stanley Kubrick of game design, developed a surreal game about
growing an army of trees from seeds and using them to infiltrate vaults containing
spider eggs [Necromancer]. The key is that Chris, Jordan, and Bill weren't
trying to please a paranoid marketing department or anyone in general. They just
wrote the best games they thought they could."

Fregger disagrees about the role of the individual
in the early days of video games ("We had teams making games very early on"),
but he is in total agreement about the evils of the marketing department. "In
the early days, we didn't have a clue as to what the public would like, so we had
carte blanche to make anything we wanted. The programmers and artists I worked with
took advantage of this situation and tried everything they could think of. As the
industry matured, games got more expensive, and marketing got a better handle on
what the public wanted. It's too bad, and it does affect the variety and originality
of product ... but, it is a fact of life."

So, like all things, the golden age faded and in its place came market surveys
and demographics and business suits and video games that just weren't as inspired
as their predecessors. But is there anything else we can learn from the early
history of video games?

Hague explains, "The history of technology is much more varied and unpredictable
than is commonly assumed. Looking to the past keeps us from thinking we know everything
about the future. The other lesson is that inspired individuals are always more important
than technology." But while the individual may be the most important aspect
aesthetically and historically, the only thing that's important from a business
standpoint is the bottom line. For every bold new concept and thrilling breakthrough,
you'll find a dozen retreats to the safety of the familiar. Lots of home games are
simply versions of popular arcade games. Lots of arcade games are just last year's
game with a Roman numeral after its title. Nintendo has spun off almost 30 Mario-related
games from that holiest of holy relics, Donkey Kong.

Recently released updates of Frogger, Pac-Man, Space Invaders,
and Pitfall bear out this trend, but with a telling difference. All of these
new versions are light-years beyond their ancestors design-wise, but interestingly,
they all contain fully playable versions of their classic lo-tech incarnations imbedded
within them. These scrupulously hidden "Easter eggs" became some of these
games' most talked-about features and proved to be an enormous selling point.

Activision went them all one better; they re-released their entire catalogue of
classics (River Raid, H.E.R.O., Sky Jinx, Freeway, Pitfall,
et al.) on one disc for the Sony Playstation. All the games were in their original
format, exactly as they had appeared almost 20 years ago on the Atari 2600.

Obviously, the industry is responding to the widespread popularity of emulators,
which can take the lion's share of the credit for the growing interest in retrogames.
An emulator is a program that lets you play old video games on your home computer.
Almost any of the old video games. For anyone with Web access, the emulators are
one mouseclick away. One cost-free mouseclick away.

But isn't that essentially a black market? Or
at least a gray market? "It's gray all the way," remarks Hague. "The
industry is scared, but slapping lawsuits on one's own fans doesn't make for a great
public image. The precedent that's being set is 'old copyrights can be overturned
by popular demand.'"

Bilstein adds: "I have heard a number of copyright experts say that this
is completely legal, and some software representatives say that it is not. But the
initial reaction of the gaming industry, which was to try to get rid of emulation
entirely, seems to have been replaced with a more tolerant attitude. The future is
uncertain, however."

In the meantime, there's much to be said for the emulators. "What great fun
it is to fire up a game I remember seeing once at a 7-Eleven in 1982 but didn't have
a chance to play," says Hague.

"I remember believing that nobody would ever be able to play these games
because the systems they played on would no longer be available," says Fregger.
"I think it's wonderful that people who care have found ways that they can be
played and remembered forever."

Fregger would like to see one of his overlooked gems get a second shot at fame
online. "Pharoah's Revenge was a fantastic product. I own it and would
gladly release it to emulators."

Emulators allow us to see and experience games that we would never otherwise have
encountered, but there are other drawbacks besides the legal implications. Like a
K-Tel greatest hits compilation or an evening's worth of programming on Nick at Nite,
emulators can destroy the historical context of what they purport to be preserving.
This is particularly troublesome since there's now a new generation of game fans
with no firsthand knowledge of their classic game heritage.

"I'm starting to see some strange rewritings of game history," says
Hague. "Some people think that Donkey Kong is a clone of the Apple II
game Cannonball Blitz, for example, when in reality it was the other way around."
Hague also notes that most games were designed with a specific physical appliance
in mind, one that was often quite different from your typical home computer. "Tron
is all but unplayable without the joystick and rotary control of the original coin-op,
to say nothing of the black light on the cabinet."

Not surprisingly, Fregger owes this to the superiority of the original product.
"The big problem is that they've never invented a joystick that works as good
as the original Atari one. ... The old machines responded quicker than the computers
do."

Another retrogamer, Randy Crihfield, freely concedes the wondrous possibilities
of emulators. "You can pause when you want to go to the bathroom," he points
out. "That used to be quite the killer when you'd hand the joystick to your
little brother 'just for a second' and then come back and find your guy dead. (And
he's playing some other game to boot!)"

But in the end, Crihfield knows that there's just no substitute for the genuine
object. "Anyone can find [a game] on the Net, but try to plug that into your
2600; it just don't happen without me making a cart for it."

Cart? That's retrogamer slang for Atari cartridges, which Crihfield makes and
sells through his Web site Hozervideo. He recycles the old plastic casings and inserts
the freshly copied programming for whatever game you desire. "The appeal for
me is I had some of these games when I was a kid but couldn't afford them all."
Now he has virtually every Atari game ever made.

photograph by Todd V. Wolfson

And that's a lot of games. Six hundred and forty-one at last count, and Crihfield
says he got a few more last weekend. Crihfield also offers precious unreleased prototypes,
many of which were designed to tie in with popular movies and shows -- games like
Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The A-Team, Alligator
People, etc. Some of the rarest and most prized retrogames were simply crass
advertising ploys that were never offered for sale. Coke Wins, Proctor and
Gamble's Tooth Protectors, and Chase the Chuckwagon ("a dog food
promotional; awful game") were the stuff of legend among retrogamers for years.

Now Crihfield sells them all, and all for just a little more than it costs him
to manufacture them. And while Crihfield himself is still on the lookout for even
more lost games, like Mr. Bill, Tempest, Ewok Adventure, and
Pink Panther, he performs an invaluable public service by ensuring that the
classic games he already has are readily available. He also offers several "carts"
that challenge our very notion of what "retrogames" can be. Crihfield sells
new retrogames, games created from scratch by amateurs using the old programming
languages, made solely for use on the old game systems.

"There is quite an active community of programmers for a number of defunct
systems," notes Bilstein. "New games have been created in the last few
years for the 2600, Colecovision, Vectrex, Odyssey2, Jaguar, and Lynx, to name a
few. These are all 'dead' systems, yet the fan base has kept them alive."

Retrogame fans, like all fan bases, combine a childlike sense of enthusiasm with
the grown-up's desire to understand, articulate, and pass on that enthusiasm. Ultimately,
it's the intensity of the fans' enthusiasm that saves retrogames from simply becoming
a piece of history. It's this enthusiasm that the 35-year-old Randy Crihfield ("last
of the baby boomers," he says) shares with his 11-year-old son when they play
Atari.

"We have more modern systems, but those games are either solo-type games
or, if they are two-player, fighting games. It's fun to compete, but why does it
have to be head bashing? We like games that go head to head, like Oink!, and
we like games that take turns, like Asteroids.

"My son and I sit down and play them together and have a blast. No, they
are not the best graphics I have ever seen in a game, but they are fun, and
we do it together. I hope my son realizes that there's always a prettier video
game system, with faster gameplay, better graphics, etc. ... But it's too easy to
want the biggest house, the fanciest car, the best video game system. Why not a modest
house, a reliable car, and a simple game system that's got lots of father/son games?
What's the old phrase, they just don't make 'em like they used to? Well, I still
do."